That's exactly what it was like for me when SC2 came out and I started playing the ladder, after a few weeks I got used to it. I then saw it again when I got my roommate to start playing, and I could feel his anxiety. I figured out that the main cause was the fog of war, people unused to scouting and extrapolating possible enemy forces are very prone to freaking out and turtling up, which will lose the game almost always.